Tag Archives: Blogathon 2003

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Just a quick note this morning to once again thank all of the sponsors who pledged money in our name during the Blogathon this weekend. As of this morning our total pledges stand at $193.25, almost $100 more than the goal I had hoped to hit. You can still sponsor us through the end of the day today if you want to get in at the last minute and push that total over $200, but we’re pretty happy with what we’ve accomplished and we thank all of you who supported us.

I started cruising around the Blogathon webring to see how others are holding up and my sense of pride has swelled somewhat as a result. Even my minimal entries have had more content than some of these other folks in the last wee hours and that’s no small feat considering how fried my brain is feeling. I’m managing by forcing myself to become highly interested in random objects that I normally take for granted such as the intricate design on the Kleenex box or that stupid scroll bar on the bottom of the CNN channel. How’d they get that pattern on the Kleenex box? Truth is I know exactly how they did it, but I intentionally suppressed that knowledge and pretended I was the target audience for the Sci-Fi’s Tuesday Night Declassified shows (read: that I have the IQ of cheez whiz) and I proceeded to invent all manner of ludicrous methods for the pattern to be put on that stupid box like they used enslaved gerbils specially trained to paint random patterns with their tails in exchange for kibble and water. You know, only highly plausible explanations. Now my brain hurts. It’s my own fault.

They’re talking about the anniversary of the rescue of the Quecreek miners last year on CNN. I’ll refrain from expressing my opinion of all this hype over this event as I’m sure it’d just piss people off. “Hallowed ground.” Give me a break.

This wouldn’t be so hard if I could keep my brain engaged, but the time limit on entries means you can’t spend too much time writing about one thing so you have to think of something else later. Meanwhile you sit around between entries trying to think of what the next thing you’re gonna write will be. If I were gaming this wouldn’t be so bad. In my youth it wasn’t unusual to get so wrapped up in a video game that the next thing I knew it was 6AM and the birds were chirpin’. I can remember the time that Bill and I sat up all night playing Stellar Conquest on his C-64 despite the fact that he had to work that morning. I went home and collapsed, he went in to work. I had tried to leave sooner, but he was determined to finish the game.

Worse, however, was the time we were all playing on Hero Mud and Rob and I both were down to the last quest before making Wizard on the MUD. It was a new quest they had just put in and we were the first couple of people to be working on it. I hadn’t really intended it to happen this way, but we got into a bit of a competition to see who could solve it first and we were both up for 36 hours straight until we solved it. I figured it out first. It never occurred to me to sleep because my brain was so busy working on the problem I was trying to solve that it never had time to get tired. Looking back on it now I realize I was nuts, but it wasn’t a big deal at the time.

So if I’d been able to play a video game all night it’s clear I wouldn’t be struggling to make it these last couple of entries. So I just need to find a Game-a-thon next year and I’ll be awesome and women will throw themselves at me and men will fear me. Yeah, that’s the ticket…

Oh look, it’s the sun. It’s starting to peek over the horizon. The birds are all pissed off about it and chirping like thousands of little maniacs. It’s cloudy here so I can’t actually see the sun, but the clouds are a lot lighter so either the sun is rising or there’s one big assed UFO hovering over my apartment complex.

I’m watching some sort of special report on CNN where some female reporter is being dragged around Alaska and right now she’s trying to climb down a wall of ice into a crevasse all the while trying to explain to us what the dangers posed by crevasses are and she’s damn near slipping and falling down the ice wall. If it were me I’d be like “You putz’s can fucking wait until I get my ass down the wall before I try to talk to you. I need to friggin’ CONCENTRATE!”

This channel has become a clearing house for pseudo-science, wild conspiracy theories and supernatural claptrap. It started with the success of Crossing Over with John Edward and now they have a whole night dedicated to programs that masquerade as investigative endeavors. They’ve resurrected the show In Search Of…, but where the old show narrated by Leonard Nemoy was actually trying to make an honest investigation in the topics it covered. This new show narrated by the X-File’s Mitch Pileggi does little more than regurgitate the same old urban legends and sensationalist myths as is common in most occult book stores. The episode on my television right now has them going ‘in search of’ psychic spies. The story is focusing on people who supposedly have an ability called remote viewing. The show mentions the fact that the CIA had a program that was set up to see if this ability was real and could be developed for use in the spy trade. Former US Army Major Ed Danes has just shown up (he’s often the one promoting this crap) which is ironic as he was just on Unscrewed the other night. What they haven’t mentioned yet is the fact that this program was canceled years ago because it was an utter failure (something that was brought out on Unscrewed). Now they’re supposedly testing one of Ed Dane’s students. The test itself isn’t set up as a double blind test and naturally they’re already saying that the results are “astounding.” Oh, by the way, did you know that Ed Danes claims that anyone can learn to do remote viewing and he just happens to run a business that purports to teach people how to master this technique? They’re claiming that Ed Danes has been called in on a number of important events such various plane crashes and the search for the Unibomber. They don’t bother to mention if anything he had to contribute was useful for those investigations, but they sure make it sound important. Note that the Unibomber was at large for over a decade before his brother turned him in. If the results the show presents are true (the student manages not only to locate the target as being at the airport, but in a specific restaurant at the airport) then one wonders why they weren’t able to locate the Unibomber with equal accuracy.

The rest of the shows they air on Tuesday night aren’t much better. This annoys the hell out of me because the motivation behind these shows is the fact that belief in the occult and pseudo-science is on the rise and these shows are designed to pull in ratings, not actually reveal any kind of truth. It promotes and encourages people to buy into this crap making them easy targets for scam artists such as Ed Danes.

B&T’s EA just ended. Now it’s one of those police chase shows. I suppose it’s admitting to my redneck heritage to say that I actually enjoy watching these stupid shows. I think it’s my amazement that people can be so stupid as to risk their lives as well as the lives of everyone around them trying to get away from the cops. They put these shows on the air in hopes it’ll convince these stupid people it’s not worth running if they’re ever in this situation, but they’re stupid people for a reason and thus this doesn’t work as is evidenced by the continuing episodes being aired.

Still, it makes for some mindless entertainment at 5:22 AM when there’s nothing else better on…

When I left my desktop publishing position at Kinko’s the next job I took on was as a Systems Operator for a company called Teletrac. This company sold vehicle location devices for corporate fleet tracking and stolen vehicle recovery. We maintained a network of 23 IBM PCs running a mix of QNX, MS-DOS, Windows 95 and OS/2 and I worked the Midnight shift. Hairboy would join me a few months later. It was pretty damned boring most of the time because we sat around waiting for something to break. One thing we were allowed to do, though, was watch TV. Which sounds great until you realize that late-night/early morning television sucks, which it didn’t take us long to realize.

Thus it was that we grew to really appreciate PBS in general and This Old House in particular. Which is funny as hell when you consider that neither of us owned some much as a hammer, let alone a plane saw, miter, or a house to fix up. We didn’t know dick about house restoration and yet after only a few months we were discussing the relative merits of the home owner’s choices in counter top materials and if it was smart to go with the recessed lighting in the family room. We both agreed that if we were to ever suddenly come into a home that needed restoration from an eccentric aunt that had passed away that we’d died seek out Norm to do the work as the man was a master woodworker. It was sad, two of the biggest geeks in the history of geeks sitting around talking about house restoration as if we were born to the role. This just shows you how desperate we got for something, anything, intelligent to watch in the middle of the night.